Cashu is powering far more than just Bitcoin wallets.
While most people think of standard user-facing Bitcoin wallets when they hear Cashu, there’s a whole separate economy emerging around machine-to-machine payments.
One of the best examples is Routstr, an open-source decentralized marketplace for AI inference.
Routstr uses Nostr and Cashu at its core. Providers offer AI inference, and users pay for AI with Bitcoin. You can use Routstr as a normal AI chat interface or as a provider for your own AI agent. It gives users access to hundreds of models, similar to OpenRouter, but paid in Bitcoin with strong privacy for the payments attached to your AI chats.
There are no accounts. To fund your balance, you pay a Lightning invoice and mint Cashu ecash. Every time you make a query, you attach ecash to the request itself as a bearer token and micropayment for that individual call.
Now here’s the cool part. Anyone can become a provider because Nostr is an open network. Anyone can become an ecash mint because of how easy it is to run a Cashu mint. And every Routstr user has full control over which providers and which mint they choose.
I think Routstr is a great example of what becomes possible with a micropayment system like Cashu on Bitcoin. It removes much of the friction involved in building apps that use payments, because you don’t need to create user accounts, build a ledger, or track users at the expense of their privacy.
reminder that the average p2pk address has 49.41 #bitcoin (or as of today $3.7M) and NOT millions of btc
the average taproot address on the other hand has 0.044 $btc or $~3k
due to a conflict with an already existing metric, the series you know as "investor price" in BRK/bitview will be renamed to "capitalized price" to avoid any confusion
context:
realized price: avg price of each $btc
capitalized price: avg $btc price of each usd invested
worked out great, had a sub 1s block on the server (mac mini m4 w/ ext. storage) and all new blocks I've seen so far where processed under 2s
building a fully custom db from scratch for BRK (vecdb/rawdb) was definitely worth it
speed improvement available in v0.2.5